Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau To Talk Up Canada’s Tech Industry At MIT

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Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will promote Canada’s technology industry, particularly the field of artificial intelligence, at a speech to be delivered on Friday at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Prime Minister Trudeau has aggressively promoted Canada’s technology industry south of the border in the United States in recent months and will do so again when he speaks at MIT’s Solve initiative, which connects leading innovators with corporate, government and academic resources to help them tackle world problems.

“Tech giants have taken notice, and are setting up offices in Canada, hiring Canadian experts, and investing time and money into applications that could be as transformative as the Internet itself,” the Canadian Prime Minister wrote in a guest editorial published in the Boston Globe earlier this week ahead of the speech at MIT.

In particular, Prime Minister Trudeau has been keen to promote Canada’s leadership in artificial intelligence (AI), noting that Canadian computer scientists helped pioneer the field of AI, and explaining the basics of machine learning as he promotes a national plan he says will “secure Canada’s foothold in AI research and training.”

Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Uber and Samsung have all opened AI research hubs centred in Montreal, Toronto and Edmonton, drawn by decades of academic research into deep learning algorithms that helped pave the way for today’s digital voice assistants, self-driving technology and photo-tagging services that can recognize a friend’s face.